


scars are a record of things that tried and failed to stop you

by Canonymous



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Violence, Nightmares, Scars, Sort Of, Suicidal Thoughts, Violent Thoughts, mildly though, nothing happens explicitly but she thinks about violence a bit, spiral vs slaughter discussion, toward the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24721411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canonymous/pseuds/Canonymous
Summary: How can she know she tried her hardest to fight if she doesn’t come out with scars? How will she prove herself, then?(Or: Melanie King, and how she knows her own name.)
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	scars are a record of things that tried and failed to stop you

**Author's Note:**

> hi!! so this was just a quick exercise in figuring out melanie and her anger and i actually like the final product a lot. i am american so do me a favor and ignore any parts where that’s glaringly obvious? anyway this is a little all over the place but basic timeline just to avoid spoilers is the first bit’s sometime in season 3, the second is during the post s3 and pre s4 period, and the last is post episode 155. cw for violence discussed, violent intrusive thoughts, some discussion of physical trauma, thoughts of losing yourself/identity issues, blindness, nightmares, all that kind of thing. please be mindful of all that before you read!! thank you and please enjoy :)

Melanie has a very similar dream almost biweekly. She hasn’t told anyone about it before because she, secretly, thinks it’s sort of a good dream to have, even if it scares her to hell and back every time. She thinks it’s a good thing to be afraid of, to lose the parts of yourself that matter most. She dreams:

Melanie King reaches a hand out to shake. Someone takes it, and it never really matters who because the scary part is never if she’s losing someone else or if someone isn’t who they pretend to be—she thinks deep down that maybe everyone else in the entire world is certain of who they are and she’s just playing along,  _ that’s _ the scary part, it’s about her. But she reaches out to shake a hand and whoever says, “Jonathan Sims,” with a voice faltering enough he sounds worried it’s not true or “I’m Elias Bouchard,” in one that seems to hint deliberately at the same, a private joke, or “Basira, actually,” with the sound of determination and certainty she envies, she longs for. It’s a rotating cast of people she knows or hates or loves. It doesn’t matter. It never matters. She says  _ I’m Melanie King. _

She says  _ I’m Melanie King. _ She gets a funny look. She says  _ I’m— _

No words come out. She scowls. It should be easier, and the person she’s shaking hands with did it without all the delay, and she knows her own name. Of course she does. Her name is—

She says,  _ I’m— _

She can’t have forgotten. She can’t have, she’s certain of that, surely. She spends years trying to define it and suddenly the letters escape her grasp, crushed on the tip of her tongue when she bites it, afraid something wrong will come out instead. She searches for a hint, tossing her gaze around the room that never means anything and never has a mirror and never wants to help. She can trust only herself and herself knows everything but what her name  _ is. _

So she turns to herself to look for her secret. Why would the person across her ever know? They could only guess. Sometimes they try, but only she knows what to do to earn it back—she casts a look downward and there is a flavor like  _ despair _ in her mouth as she spots skin, perfectly smooth, on her right hand. She had a scar there. She had a scar there and when she looked down at it reminded her of spite and glory and  _ I told you so _ but now it’s blank and it reminds her of nothing at all, it reminds her of  _ I’m— _

It gets worse from there. The person beside her has by this point vanished; she has never been afraid other people don’t know her, and she’s doing plenty to freak  _ herself _ out with the mapping of marks she knows belong in her skin. She traces a line down to her lip where she knows the memory of hitting her face viciously on the edge of the dining room table, in the wake of a challenge to her father that led to a fight that led to her bleeding on the floor, belongs. The skin is smooth and it infuriates her because she could’ve sworn her lips are always chapped and have been scarred since that day. She says  _ I’m— _

If the girl without a name never snapped at her father it means she backed down. She feels further from herself than ever. Had she backed down? Had she ducked her head and said  _ nevermind _ , had she bitten her tongue clean off with the anger she let stick in her throat, instead, like the acidic aftermath of word vomit she swallowed instead of spit out? Surely not. 

If she backed down, then, she knows for certain she does not have a name. If she let it go she is not who she is. If she surrendered, she does not deserve even a single letter.

Then: She wakes up and she’s choking on heavy breaths, mind still foggy with confusion and limbs still weighed down with sleep. It never stops her. She can’t think straight, not until she sees it for herself, not when the only name she has is still rattling around without definition in her skull. Tonight she nearly slips and eats shit when her socks slide on the bathroom tiles but she catches herself on the towel rack and spins.

Her right hand grasps helplessly, desperately, at her face and relief thrums so strong in her veins she gets violently dizzy. There is a scar stretching from the top of her lip to skin just beneath her pierced nose and the hand grappling at it for reassurance almost doesn’t curl right at the pinky for the scar, too, there. 

“I’m— _ Melanie King. Melanie fucking King. _ Don’t you forget it,” she shouts, hoarse, at the mirror, pointing her finger so hard at it the nail bends under the pressure. She grins, traces the scar on her lip again. She said something half-clever to earn it, she thinks, but she’s long forgotten it. It wasn’t fair at the time. Looking at it reminds her why she won’t let something unfair lie still, protected by her averted gaze, ever again.

Melanie King: body of scars and spite and vindication. She’s reassured enough to stop clutching at evidence of consequence of her bravery, and to, reluctantly, return to her mattress. 

* * *

She likes Helen because they’re completely antithetical. 

“I must be a right meal for you,” she admits, one day, alone in a hallway that isn’t Helen’s but probably could be, if their relationship were just a shade colder. 

A door creaks and she grins with her teeth. Helen comes when she calls as long as she doesn’t call her name. Or not her name. Whatever one would classify Helen as.

“Evening, Melanie,” Helen singsongs, leaned in the door frame just ahead of a backdrop of colors that make her ears pop. “I wouldn’t call it a meal.”

“Yeah?” she asks, though it’s more to punctuate her next best guess. She wonders if there are other Melanie Kings, if she could search them all up in the phone book and go around wreaking havoc. It’s an ugly thought. It tugs the smile back onto her face. “So, what, then—a trip?”

Helen leaves the door open behind her when she moves to put her back against the wall beside Melanie. Her presence is dizzying as ever. She smells like a candle Melanie has never caught a whiff of. Something almost sharp. She likes it. 

“It’s more like… you remind me of me,” she hums thoughtfully, tapping an impossibly long, impossibly sharp finger against her chin to mime considering. Melanie King thinks, distantly, that she’d really like to see Helen use those like a weapon, tearing someone apart. She doesn’t think she would care much if it were herself, as long as it was violent, cruel. Angry. “I’d compare it to being fed parts of you, but it’s not even quite that. More like.. we’re sharing, I think. I’m borrowing all that worry. You know, the fear that you aren’t what you think, and you don’t see what’s real until it’s too late, all the.. grappling with something so trivial as a  _ name _ , as if it’s anything other than a sound to shove you in a little labeled box.”

“Hm.” She isn’t sure she likes that, actually. “What are you borrowing it for?”

“To become more of me,” she answers with a smile, sharp teeth twinkling in light that her mind isn’t sure is real. “And also to become less.”

Melanie sighs, a great, heaving thing. “I can’t tell if I like your riddles or not,” she admits, pinching the bridge of her nose until it hurts. 

“Oh, I love that. A little of both and a little of neither. See? You’re a natural.” Her laugh makes Melanie’s head hurt as if it were physically jarring it. 

She feels absently for the scar on her lip, just for the reassurance, with all the talk of how her name means nothing and she is nothing and she could like being nothing if she didn’t like the violent path she’s on so much. Helen frowns.

“And then you go and ruin that talent with your little rituals,” she laments. Melanie blinks.

“My what?” she asks, genuinely confused.

“Your affirmations. The lies you tell yourself but actually then believe, all the tiny comforts in the marks on your physical form..” Helen makes a face like she’s disgusted. She reminds Melanie of a mother, sometimes. She wonders if it hurt when she became the thing that is and isn’t Helen, if there was blood and gore carved into her, too. 

“You define yourself by what you’ve lived through,” Helen says, voice soft and grating all at once. “And that’s such an disturbingly  _ real _ thing.”

Melanie King: body that’s ‘disturbingly real’, and durable, and so so easy to use to reimagine the violence she’s lived through, and with, all this time. She grins, and hopes the blood she tastes in her mouth is real.

* * *

Her dreams get bad after the bullet comes out. Her dreams get so much worse after her theatrical exit from the Magnus Institute.

She dreams:

Melanie King faces a thing almost called Helen. She says, “Hi there,” in a voice that makes her molars ache, “I’m Helen.” She laughs like if a songbird were to scream, at that. Melanie wonders what’s so funny. “You’ll see,” Helen answers, though she didn’t say that part out loud.

Melanie says,  _ I’m— _

Oh, no.

She says,  _ I’m— _

She screws her face up in anger, pulls fury around her like a cloak. Fine. She’s done this before. She needs a hint. The room is as unhelpful as ever, and Helen looks to be mouthing something at her, but it’s all wrong and none of the syllables she’s shaping make sense. She realizes that Helen isn’t going to help her. No one helps her, she thinks. She guesses, more like. How can she know without even a name?

Right. She looks down at her hand for the scar. She says  _ I’m— _

She does not look down at her hand for the scar. She screams, actually, but no sound comes out of her throat and her maybe scarred lip because she’s not looking at anything at all. She can’t see. She can’t fucking see and her hand might have a scar and it might not and she doesn’t remember which one’s right. She grapples for her face and finds she can’t feel it. She screams and something like a whimper escapes her. It’s weak and small and pathetic and she can’t tell if she hates it because she has no name and she can’t even say  _ I’m—  _ and there are no landmarks and there is no one and she is nothing at all and

She wakes up with a gasp that sends her coughing. She’s nauseous with the panic of it all and she wrestles her way out of a sheet she can’t see to sprint to a mirror, except she lands hard on her elbows with a vicious  _ thud _ against a cold hardwood floor and then has no idea where to go.

She says, “I’m—“ and she has never been more afraid. It’s blinding, the fear, and then the fear is of being blind. She can’t breathe.

“ _ I’m—” _ she whispers, through a wheeze that feels like trying to not give up, and then, 

“Melanie?” a soft voice asks, heavy with sleep but touched by worry. There’s rustling that barely reaches her through the name pulsing in her ears. Of course. Of course,  _ Melanie _ , that sounds so right. Does she know Melanie? There’s something familiar, there, but it feels so ill-defined without her reflection staring back at her with wild, angry eyes and a vindictive grin. Without  _ seeing _ her scars she needs proof she  _ needs to know she lived— _

“Melanie,” the voice repeats, firmer this time. She’s coming close to breathing again. Georgie’s voice—of course, it’s Georgie,  _ that’s it _ —puts a pause on her panic as a stand in until Georgie’s hands, touching hers, begins to actually soothe it. 

“Is that right?” another voice asks. She thinks it might be her own. It’s sharper than Georgie’s, rough around the edges and crackling with something brittle like broken glass. “Melanie?” 

She reaches up with her (scarred?) right hand—and Georgie’s left, still tangled in her own—to touch her lip, feeling along a line of raised skin. She wishes she could see it. God, she wants to see it. She can’t quite believe it’s real without her eyes. “Is this real?” she pleads, distinctly ashamed of the vulnerable note to her voice.

“The scar?” Georgie hums, slowly, kindly. Her hand twitches and there's a touch, feather light, where her own fingers had just felt along. “Yeah, Melanie. Do you know where you are?” Georgie doesn’t sound concerned with the scar. She hardly even lingers on it, sounds confused about why Melanie was trying to find it. She’s radiating warmth and Melanie doesn’t deserve it because it doesn’t remind her whatsoever of hurting.

“With you,” she answers, because it’s as good as she’s got. She does  _ try,  _ though, to tug on that thread of clarity. Right. She’s with Georgie, Georgie Barker. “I.. quit, and. We’re together, and—and that’s why we were in bed with each other. And now we’re on the floor, because I had a dream and I tried to get up and run.”

“Right,” she answers, squeezing her hands. “Good, that’s good, Melanie. So you had a bad dream, and it scared you, but it wasn’t real. D’you know what is real?”

She can’t get over how right her name sounds in Georgie’s mouth. Melanie. Melanie King, for that matter. She instinctively tries to look down toward her right hand, but the scar would be covered, anyway, by Georgie’s hand, she wouldn’t be able to  _ feel _ it and  _ see _ it and most of all  _ know _ it.

That doesn’t scare her as much as she expected. 

Melanie King loves Georgie, though she hasn’t told her yet. Melanie King recognizes this gesture of affection and it’s  _ so _ much more substantial than a mark from her childhood, in grounding her. 

Her scars don’t speak to her. They almost did, once upon a time after an adventure in the wrong place at the wrong time, but her scars can’t tell her anything but a story. She thinks if they could, they might tell her something like,  _ I am proof that you lived, once. _ They remind her she was there, stubbornly, angrily, miserably, through it anyway. Her scars remind her there were people who hurt her, once, and she was stronger.

Georgie, with her quiet comforts and patient questions across from Melanie, reminds her there are people who would never do the same. She reminds her not just that she lived, but that she is  _ alive. _

“This is real,” Melanie King says, with her whole heart, holding up their hands, together. Thinks,  _ I’m Melanie King.  _ “ _ We’re _ real.”

She can  _ hear _ Georgie’s smile as she murmurs, “We really are, aren’t we?” She manages a smile in return. “Right, then. D’you went to get back to bed, or do you want to stay up a bit? What do you need, Melanie?”

Melanie King: body of survival, of bittersweet victories, and of hands shaped like they were looking for Georgie Barker’s to hold for a long long time. She could cry. She doesn’t even think Georgie would hold it against her, if she did.

“Back to bed is fine,” she answers. “I think I forgot my dream, already, anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! i’m on tumblr @themostrabidofcarebears if you ever want to talk or ask questions, & be sure to drop a kudos or a comment if you feel so inclined!


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